lsc

>As long as your income is not at the lower end of the distribution

I think this is key. If you make $200K/yr, saving 1/10th that means you drive a lexus and not a benz. The Lexus is not worse than the Benz in any objective way; you paid less and got a car that is going to be more reliable and cost less when it does break. I mean, don't get me wrong, I like how the german cars drive, but you've gotta be really dedicated to own one out of warranty.

The problem is that sure, at a high income, you can usually save a lot of money by making sacrifices that are merely aesthetic, by buying goods that are objectively no worse (and sometimes objectively better) - but below a certain point, buying a cheaper good is going to get you something objectively worse; often something that will end up costing more in the long term. Downgrading from a 15 year old Toyota to a 25 year old ford is going to get you something that probably costs you more, in total, to operate, even though the initial purchase price will be lower.

I mean, I think the disagreement here is mostly at what level this happens.

so... I've never been really poor, but like most of us, I've had lower income and higher income. Everyone gets unexpected bills, but my experience has been that those bills don't get larger with your income (even though most of your expected bills do grow with income) - a lot of those unexpected bills get smaller in absolute terms as your income goes up; both cars and medical expenses, in my experience, tend to move from 'unexpected bill' to 'expected bill' as your income goes up, as you generally get much better health insurance and newer cars.

But even the things that don't move from unexpected to expected are harder to deal with when you are poor.

Example; person A makes $14K/yr at walmart. They put away 10% of that every month. person B makes $200K/yr at Facebook. They put away 10% of that every month.

Say you get a $250 parking ticket.

If you are putting away 10% of your 14,000/yr salary - that parking ticket is gonna be a pretty big bite of your savings. I mean, if you've been putting away $1400 a year, you can cover it, but that $250 is still a big bite.

If you work at facebook... say you are still putting away 10% of your $200,000 salary - that parking ticket costs you just as much, but it is a whole order of magnitude smaller when compared to your savings rate.

Medical expenses are the more common case for unexpected bills; it's super expensive to get hurt while poor. It's not so expensive to get hurt while wealthy.

Say you are playing catch with your kid nephew and you fall and mess up your knee. If you make $14,000, you probably have health insurance with the maximum deductible, and end up having to pay a bunch out of pocket. the 2019 out of pocket limit for an ACA compliant HDHP plan is $6750 - that's going to take a lot of saving 10% to pay off. And even if you do get it fixed, you probably have a job where you have to stand up and carry things; you will need a bunch of time off, time off that you're not gonna get paid for.

Say the same things happens to the software engineer making $200K/yr. First, that job probably comes with pretty nice health insurance; you probably aren't out much out of pocket at all. The place where I work offers a HDHP plan but they actually give you an amount of money equal to the deductible every year. (me, I still take the traditional plan, 'cause I'm willing to pay extra if I don't have to deal with medical billing at all) Next? SWE jobs usually come with a bunch of paid time off. This person probably gets paid to recover at home. And if they felt like they needed to work? they probably could work from home; and for that matter, their job probably doesn't involve knees much, so they are gonna be able to go back in to work much sooner than the guy working at walmart.

A mediocre engineer is worth on the order of a million bucks a year to one of these big companies... one engineer can create a reasonably large amount of 'capital' - that doesn't make it cheap.

Yeah, you could build that capital for yourself rather than for a big company, if you wanted to; that doesn't mean it wasn't expensive.

That, and I think that big successful projects take a lot more than just someone who can build a decent website. Take friendster... one of my favorite examples 'cause it was one of the real-world cases of a company dying due to insufficient resources being put into systems administration and scaling. They were in the right place, at the right time, with the right product to become what facebook is now; they got traction, but due to performance and reliability issues, they ended up leaving an opening for Facebook to come in and eat their lunch.

And even getting to the point where facebook was is really hard.

I mean, it happens; Craigslist is a famous example, but usually you need more than one engineer worth of capital to build one of these things, and you need more than just engineers.

haha. that's quite the math error on my part. somehow I was thinking we were talking 300sqft places, which seems reasonable to me. 1/3rd that is a lot less reasonable, for my preferences. I guess then we're talking a capsule hotel, which... really does seem reasonable/useful for some things, but would be... inconvenient as a primary residence.

I... think per-squarefootage costs right now fit my budget just fine? but only ifyou sell me a 300sqft place, like this describes.

Most "middle class" owners bought in before prices came up; real-estate, like everything, is priced at the margin

sure, but the things we're talking about are 10m^2, or a little more than 300sqft.

If you are building for me, you have a water closet with toilet and shower, and then a sink, but no real kitchen. I eat out or at work anyhow; a desktop convection oven is overkill for my kitchen needs.

I mean, I think at this point we're around/above the size of the bedroom most people rent around here? I mean, at that size, I want a murphy bed, but even without, this is a size a lot of people live with right now.

Sure, I'd prefer some place bigger... but if you sell me 10m^2 in the bay area, say, for a quarter million dollars? I'd vastly prefer that to the really big place that a quarter million gets me in the midwest.

Preferences vary.

>Perhaps, disintegration of middle-class is a root cause for people considering such living standards as 'convenient'. Effectively,you live in a tight dorm.

so, uh, I didn't go to school, so maybe I'm missing something, but I thought that dorms were usually shared bedrooms or something; personally, I think there's a huge difference between having a small private space and having no private space, and most of the problem with living in a dorm is having no private space.

That's where this sort of thing comes in. A lot of the single people I know in silicon valley, even a lot of the high earners, rent rooms in houses; houses that are designed for families. The thing is, if you are an introvert, you'd be better off with something built in a more hotel-like way, with more private area per common area, and with more bathrooms. (oh my, with more bathrooms.)

Ah, perhaps I misunderstood. I thought you meant availability to the general public; I mean, two archival copies of a work doesn't do a lot to ensure I can read it; as I understand, if you can't find the rightsholder, that still doesn't let you print copies until copyright is up.

>Everything else I thinkg I can agree with. Particularly the problems with Amazon's review and ratings system -- I guess it must work to bring more money to Amazon, but it's really annoying.

I personally think it's amazon's biggest problem; some of their products are distinctly premium; The kindle experience is way more expensive than just buying used books... and for in copyright books, it's a premium I'm happy to pay. I spend a lot more on books now that I have a kindle (I read a little more... but I also pay more per book)

The same goes for goods. Like, I'm happy to pay extra for something that arrives fast and that is what it says on the tin. I mostly (but not always) get that from major brand goods that sell a lot, but for unbranded stuff? I might as well go to aliexpress or something; the reviews don't match the product quite often.

I personally think that this is amazon's biggest problem; at least it's amazon's biggest problem when it comes to getting more of the money I spend. I don't know how representative I am.

eh, but copyright as it stands now, decreases the availability of literature (I mean, aside from how it encourages creating it, which is super important, of course.) so those things couldn't have been reasons for creating copyright law as it stands in the US.

(an interesting side effect, as a person willing to spend money on books? It's a lot easier to get a good e-book of something still under copyright than of something out of copyright. Like, I'm super happy to pay $20 or whatever for something better-than-gutenberg and that's really a lot of effort. I don't really know how they do it, 'cause half the for pay out of copyright books for kindle on amazon are worse than just downloading the .mobi from gutenberg. For anything public domain, you have to wade through a sea of badly formatted garbage, even if you are largely price insensitive; price isn't a reasonable signal either way. On the other hand, if it is in public domain, you almost certainly will be able to find an e-book of it, and the quality you get just hitting gutenberg really isn't that bad, while if it is in copyright, if it is an obscure book, your only real option is paper.)

I wonder how much of my problem with finding well formated kindle books is my own lack of familiarity with the search tools and publishing houses? or with amazon's lack of features (like, some sort of rating for the publisher would be useful here. Right now, amazon makes it really hard with their combining of reviews for different formats/editions/publishers. Like sometimes the kindle version and paper version (for out of copyright books) will be different publishers, and amazon just glomps the reviews together, making it really quite difficult.

Yeah, the point is to encourage creation; I agree that there should be some requirement that you must distribute a work to keep that copyright.

>The only way to keep the things you buy is to actually own them. Not continually rent them from one online service after another.

Eh, as someone who has owned (and lost or destroyed) a bunch of physical things, my experience is that I have to continually rebuy physical things I use; I mean, records, CDs, books... these all get lost and destroyed in various ways if you carry them around with you and otherwise use them. I don't think that the way I own and store things is more reliable than a major content licensing platform. If I use a thing consistently and long term, then licensing it is certainly more reliable than buying a physical copy, and may very well be cheaper for me than buying physical copies new.

I'd argue that what protects availability of things that go out of print is more that other people own the thing and can sell me a copy when mine is lost or destroyed. You could argue this is a bit of a tragedy of the commons, or it could be, if E-books started pushing physical books out of print (as opposed to books that are e-only mostly being books that wouldn't have been printed at all before the advent of e-book technology)

Of course, for things that are rare (and things that are popular are a lot less likely to go out of print) this gets expensive pretty fast, but first sale doctrine does assure me that I can usually get a copy, if I'm willing to pay enough, while the possibility does exist, with electronic copies, that I won't be able to get a copy at all... that's true.

"Microsoft will refund customers in full for what they paid, plus an extra $25 if they made annotations or mark-ups."

that... I mean, if they automatically refund everyone? that sounds... really pretty good? I mean, I've got a few grand into my kindle books. I bet I have more than a grand in obsolete technical books alone. If the kindle was no longer the dominant platform (or rather, if there was another platform with more books) if you wanted to pay me several thousand dollars to re-buy my library on a different platform? Sure, I'd take that deal.

(I mean, if it's not an automatic refund, if it's instead the more usual "we'll refund if you remember to call us between this time and that time, and if you are willing to argue for hours, that is a very different sort of thing, of course. I just think you can make the argument that we should be very forgiving of businesses if they want to unwind in a way that causes them to refund every penny of revenue they ever acquired.)

I think if you are going to seriously argue that the US net benefited from the Vietnam war... or that Vietnam itself would not have been better off if it wasn't attacked by the US, I just don't know what to say.

Most of the world, I think, went to war against the axis powers because they were attacked by axis powers, so the question is "what did Germany and Japan think they could get out of starting this war?" and the best answer I can come up with is Norman Ohler's book on it;

I mean, I can see why the allied countries decided they needed to throw all they had into the fight... I just don't see how Germany could have actually done the math sober and thought they could win a war against... almost the rest of the world.

>And also, yes, some consider relative wealth more important than absolute wealth; "I'd rather have $100 and my neighbor $10, than I have $150 and my neighbor $140."

I actually think that's a bad example, 'cause if I have 10x what my neighbor has, I can easily convert some of that wealth differential into real wealth for me in ways I couldn't if we were more equal. "Hey neighbor, would you like to mow my lawn for some money?" so in a real way, the neighbor example is more about how much you want local labor vs mass manufactured goods.

>Tens of thousands of people comprehend Einstein's work. It used to be hundreds. We're smart as shit these days.

In some ways, I feel like this is the real singularity. This trend towards feeding and offering education to everyone. Like, it used to be that to be an intellectual, you'd need to be born rich to get the free time and education. I mean, being born rich still helps, sure, but a lot more people are getting a shot.

On the other hand, it's a process that levels off at some point, like everything else. The population is leveling off; as we bring education and leisure time to more and more of the world, eventually most of the people who have the capability to do this sort of thing will have done it.

I mean, I see that with computers, too... like with the leveling out of Moore's law; exponential processes, in nature, tend to not remain exponential.

>Just like wars, in trade wars one side gets hit worse than the other, which is kinda the point I guess.

but if both sides are worse off at the end than at the beginning... why do it? Are people really willing to immiserate themselves if they know the other guy is even worse off?

I always thought of wars as conflicts over resources where one side, at least, though they could gain more by fighting than what the fight would cost them. But some wars, I have a hard time putting some wars into that framework without going way out into conspiracy land, and even then, what possible profit, say, could the US have gotten out of Vietnam, or the USSR out of Afghanistan that would justify the cost of those wars? was it just an error in judgement about how much such a war would cost?

>good at solving open problems by (apparently) intuiting connections and making inferences, probably with the appearance of creative operation and experimental learning, but lacking any genuine desire or personal agency.

so, like a philosophical zombie? like something that appears to be conscious but isn't?

without creativity... I don't think it would make for a very effective slave in a world that is constantly changing.

Is creativity possible without consciousness? I don't pretend to be an expert.

I understand the mercantilist view, I just don't think it's credible.

>Is consciousness a necessary component for AGI, though?

I always thought so. Like, without volition, it's just a really good natural language tool, and not a general intelligence.

What would an artificial general intelligence without consciousness look like to you?

>But this trade war is a bifurcation of the world that was going to happen sooner or later.

why is it inevitable? What do trade wars get us?

As I understand it, trade wars decrease the GDP of the world, decrease the total output and productivity of markets on both sides. I mean, certainly, it's better than a war war, but it's something that has great costs for both sides, and few (no?) Benefits for either.

exactly... we don't even have a definition of consciousness that is better than Jacobellis v. Ohio - For that matter, I'm not sure we even have it that good. I'm not sure I'd recognize a non-human consciousness when I saw it. I'm not sure anyone would.

I mean, sure, I can totally see the idea that consciousness is maybe some emergent property of complex systems... in which case, sure, we could stumble upon it by accident. That is totally possible; we're creating complex self-replicating systems all over the place.

But as far as intentionally constructing the thing that will come after humanity? we can't do that until we know what, exactly, it is we are constructing, and as far as I can tell, we're pretty far away from any idea of exactly what that is.

>Are you seriously saying that the children of the wealthiest families in China are "China's best minds"? Please, show me some evidence for this egregious claim.

I've been in programming and systems administration my whole working life, and I've been working in departments that are about half foreign born for most of that time. It's always a kinda weird cultural clash at first, as I look and sound, uh, a little bit midwestern; I've never left the country, and I have zero formal education and come from a family I'd call middle class (outside the bay area middle class) And then you get these very cosmopolitan foreign born people who almost always have advanced degrees working alongside me.

My impression is pretty different from yours. My impression is that, yeah, a lot of these people were raised rich and powerful by the standards of where they came from, and many have the social defects you see in Americans who had serving staff as children. But... generally speaking? they meet or exceed the same technical standards everyone else does for the job. I mean, interviewing is hard, and sometimes they get one that isn't any good, but that's true of all people of all national origins. interviewing is hard, and you make mistakes in both directions, and have to correct later.

Now, I didn't go to school; I don't know if those that aren't any good get failed out in school, or if they don't pass the interview... but I will stand by my statement that if you put in the effort to understand the accents, these foreign students aren't worse than US born candidates. And even if we're just talking about communication, foreign born people I've worked with who were educated at US schools all wrote better than the average US-born person in the same role. I assume that was something the US schools either filtered on or taught well.

I'm just saying; my experience is that these people, one way or another, got themselves some serious education and passed a fairly high intelligence bar, too. There's no way that these are China's minds with the most potential, but they might be among China's best educated minds, and that ain't nothin'

(As an aside, I certainly agree that you overlook a lot of good people if the first step in your filtering process is "has wealthy parents." both China and the US has serious problems with wasting good minds that happen to be born to parents who aren't wealthy. That this has been true for all of history doesn't excuse the truth.)

this is my understanding as well...

but I wonder how much of that is that they just had more variable cement, and the stuff that wasn't incredibly great turned to dust long ago? Certainly, our modern processes are more repeatable and produce a narrower range of results. What if the existent buildings are outliers of the roman process?

so, it's interesting. you can see it both ways. Money distills a certain kind of power; one of the sorts of power individuals can have within a lawful system; but... there are other kinds of power that money simply doesn't convey, at least not in a system with functional rule of law.

in societies with rule of law, money provides power in a way that is... limited. No amount of money (assuming rule of law, reasonable laws, uncorrupted law enforcement, etc..) lets you have a person killed, or even roughed up without lawful reason.

In that sense, even very small time gangsters, people who make way less money than a silicon valley engineer, have more power than a law-abiding billionaire, just 'cause they can credibly threaten to have you killed.

I mean sure, the rule of law should prevent the murder in both cases, but on a practical level, it's really a lot harder to prevent crimes in the first place than to punish them after they occur; The low-level gangster's seeming willingness to do things that could potentially cause them to spend a lot of time in jail is a kind of power in and of itself, one that is unrelated (some would say negatively correlated) with wealth.

Another interesting side to this is that you could also argue that outside of functional rule of law, money is... worth a lot less, just 'cause you have to put in a lot more effort to protect that money, if the government won't do it. Without the rule of law, if you have money but don't have the sort of power that flows from the barrel of a gun, someone will simply take the money from you using that sort of power. Sure, you can hire bodyguards, but absent rule of law, what's to stop them from just stealing your money? you need some of that other kind of power to convince your bodyguards to work for a wage rather than just stealing your money.

Yeah, probably depends a lot on where. I'm just a sysadmin, the difference in pay between here in silicon valley and the cheaper parts of the US for my labor are extremely dramatic. I mean, it's dramatic for better educated programmers, too, but not nearly as much as it is for me with no degree and a less prestigious title.

I know a bunch of people who worked at lockheed around here, and, like you'd get literal MIT rocket scientists with security clearances making... dramatically less than me, even though I have one of the lower paid technical roles you can find at the FAANG companies.

What makes the whole thing super weird is that where I live, "software engineers" which is to say, javascript programmers, get paid a lot more, say, than civil engineers or aeronautical engineers... so it's weird that computer technicians try to say they are Engineers rather than the other way around.

So, I mostly agree on the costs of the '08 bailout, there's a lot of cases where problems of too much leverage become easy to solve if you have enough reserves, and my understanding was that the fundamental problem of '08 was too much leverage causing a downward spiral where everyone was forced to sell into that spiral. The private sector solution would have been to let that spiral go down much, much further before recovery; that would have caused a lot more pain and misery (and if we compare to past panics, probably wouldn't have made the resulting economy that much healthier) - The government is in a unique position because it credibly has infinite reserves and therefore can set a price floor (I mean, houses fundamentally have real value. People can live in them. but leverage can force the private sector to dramatically undervalue those real assets due to a lack of liquidity.)

Buffett's investment during the time were an example of what the private sector can do (and my opinion, as a shareholder of brk.b, who is otherwise not a finance expert, is that the man wasn't nearly greedy enough when others were fearful, but even berkshire doesn't have unlimited reserves.)

I think the big mistake of '08 was 'bailout with insufficient regulation' - if the government does need to do a bailout, that bailout should come with rules to prevent that sort of thing from happening again, and I think that there wasn't enough of that rule making after the '08 crisis.

I was just making a more general statement about the role of government in response to what I thought you were implying by pointing out the differences between how an investment in a failing company (that then doesn't fail because of your money) is accounted for differently than an investment in another person's health or education, even if the latter may net more.

In general I think the government should mostly stick with things that the private sector can't do well. The private sector is really bad at investing in things like healthcare and education for the poor that make people go from being net consumers to net producers. Government should largely focus on the things that government can do effectively but that the private sector can't do effectively. Usually this means providing services to the indigent and providing regulation (not direct ownership) of markets. But there are obviously exceptions, and I agree that '08 was one of those, it was a market failure that was big enough that the private sector couldn't really handle it, and I think direct interference was a net positive, even if I think the government could have done a much better job of it.

>First, you're ignoring the basic difference between expenditure and investment. When the government spends a dollar on healthcare, that may be an "investment" in an abstract sense, but the government is not directly getting that money back. In budgetary terms, it's expenditure

What does healthcare do for people of working age? It allows us to work more and more effectively, to make more money and either consume fewer subsides or to pay more taxes.

Good healthcare means more and more effective workers.